RPI machine: rating still rules NCAA selection process

San Diego State head coach Steve Fisher directs his team against Colorado State in the first half of an NCAA college basketball game in Fort Collins, Colo., Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2013. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
— AP

San Diego State head coach Steve Fisher directs his team against Colorado State in the first half of an NCAA college basketball game in Fort Collins, Colo., Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2013. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
/ AP

If Dennis Rodman can’t succeed in reigning in North Korea and Kim Jong Un unleashes nuclear holocaust on the planet, human civilization as we know it will be wiped out and Earth rendered uninhabitable amid the toxic radioactive cloud. Only two things figure to survive.

Cockroaches, and RPI.

They’ve been trying to kill off the Ratings Percentage Index, the computer formula that aids the selection and seeding of teams for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, practically since it was invented in 1980 and implemented in 1981. Even the spell check on your computer tries, dutifully correcting RPI to RIP.

You’ve heard everything that RPI isn’t.

It isn’t rooted in sophisticated mathematics. It doesn’t include margin of victory, doesn’t account for winning streaks or close games or injuries, doesn’t evaluate offensive and defensive efficiency. It doesn’t factor in altitude or referees or bandbox arenas. It is skewed against teams from less reputable conferences with smaller budgets. It is too easily manipulated. It is too archaic, too primitive, too flawed, too maligned, too misleading, too simplistic – too feathered hair and parachute pants and cassette tapes.

Here’s what it is: Still around. Still integral. Still relevant.

Oh, the NCAA will tell you otherwise. They’ll hold mock selection sessions with the media and walk around the room prodding, “See, you never hear us talk about RPI.” They’ll pretend that a dozen newer, more sophisticated analytics are also available and consulted in the Indianapolis hotel where the 10 members of the Selection Committee are sequestered each March like they’re choosing a pope. They'll be there again today, picking and seeding this year's NCAA Tournament field, which is expected to include San Diego State.

Mike Bobinski, the chair of the NCAA Div. I Men’s Basketball Committee, created a stir recently when he admitted on national TV that he looks at other computer metrics “fairly extensively.” A divine sign? A subtle shift? An olive branch?

John Gasaway, a statistician for ESPN and a card-carrying RPI hater, admitted his initial elation. Which quickly morphed into cynicism.

“The NCAA insists annually that it uses information from a number of sources,” Gasaway wrote on www.basketballprospectus.com, “and that the committee is particularly careful when ‘discrepancies’ arise between the various rating systems with respect to a given team. It’s striking how often these discrepancies have been resolved in a manner congruent with the RPI’s aberrant and lonely evaluative verdicts.”

As proof, he cited the 2012 field.

Colorado State finished with an RPI of 23 (out of 347 Div. I teams) but its season-ending numbers on the other major metrics were considerably lower: 96 on Pomeroy, 102 on Sagarin, 100 on Massey. The same went for Southern Mississippi: 26 on RPI but 75, 73 and 69 on the other three.

Both received at-large bids into the 68-team field, at the expense of other teams more favorably reviewed by modern statistical metrics.

The Southern Miss coach was Larry Eustachy. He credits Kentucky coach John Calipari for meeting with an RPI geek a few years back and learning how to maximize his rating, how to schedule particular nonconference opponents with particular characteristics, how to game the system.

“He came back and shared it with me, and I took a lot of notes,” says Eustachy, who has since moved to Colorado State. “There’s an art to figuring out who you should play … I think that (one day) RPI won’t be that big of an issue in determining at-large bids. But right now, it’s really everything.”

As the NCAA Tournament grew from a modest event in the early 1970s featuring exclusively conference champions … to 32 teams in 1975 … to 40 in 1979 … to 48 in 1980, the selection committee needed help analyzing and allotting the suddenly new entity of the at-large berth. It turned to Jim Van Valkenberg, from NCAA Statistics Services.

He tested a dozen or so statistical models and chose one that did not include margin of victory because it contravened the NCAA mantra of fair play, of not running up scores in pursuit of postseason spoils. Instead it rated every team in Div. I according to three factors: your winning percentage (25 percentage), your opponents’ winning percentage (50 percent) and your opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage (25 percent). It spit out a single number, or percentage, and the teams were ranked accordingly. The Rating Percentage Index was born.

Or as some have come to call it: Really Preposterous Index.

For the first decade of its existence, the RPI was like nuclear launch codes, available only to the inner circle of the selection committee. It wasn’t until recently that the NCAA began releasing official weekly RPI standings during the season, although several websites have come close to approximating them on a daily basis.

Which only heightens the comparisons and criticisms, with so many more sophisticated metrics equally accessible.

Just don’t tell that to the coaches. Whether the RPI, as Ken Pomeroy of the popular kenpom.com ratings says, “has no analytical value whatsoever,” whether there are indeed more accurate statistical formulas and methods available in 2013, whether the NCAA keeps insisting RPI is merely one of many tools the Selection Committee uses, the point is the coaches believe it is, well, really everything.

Hard to blame them. Since the formula was tweaked in 2004 to account for a game’s location, only one team with an RPI better than 30 has been snubbed by the selection committee (No. 21 Missouri State in 2006). And only four with RPIs in the 60s received at-large berths.

“I’m not sure about the newer metrics,” New Mexico coach Steve Alford says. “But the Selection Committee has made it very clear in the last 15 years the RPI is the driving force when it comes to seeding and looking at teams, because that’s what they’ve set in place.”

Alford is among the best at it. Because 75 percent of the RPI comes from your opponents and your opponents’ opponents, he spends “an awful lot of time” evaluating potential nonconference foes and how they might fare in the RPI. He tries not to schedule anyone with a projected RPI under 200 while trying to find teams picked to win smaller conferences.

New Mexico’s RPI: 2.

“There is an art to figuring out who you should play,” Eustachy says.

Teams from power conferences flush with football money can play “guarantees” to visiting teams for one-off games. The idea is to fatten your record on a bunch of mid-level RPI teams that might give you trouble on the road but aren’t going to beat you in your home arena with friendly referees (you’re paying for the game, after all, so you choose the refs), then mix in a couple neutral-court games against higher-profile opponents.

The have-nots play the RPI game, too. The Missouri Valley Conference famously instituted a scheduling mandate a decade ago to improve its overall RPI and, with it, the chances of receiving at-large berths in the NCAA Tournament (and the accompanying seven-figure payouts). Schools risked financial penalties if they didn’t comply.

The MVC rose from a one-bid league to receiving four in 2006, two of which reached the Sweet 16. The scheduling mandates were removed for unrelated reasons, and the MVC became a one-bid league again. But 75 percent of the conference’s revenue is generated from NCAA Tournament payouts, and those payouts are projected to drop from $5 million to $2 million. The scheduling mandates are back.

The West Coast Conference gives schools financial incentives to play neutral-court games that help pump the league’s RPI. It also uses the RPI to break ties for seeding in its conference tournament.

The Sun Belt has a “150 rule,” requiring a team to have at least an RPI of 150 itself or a play a nonconference schedule of opponents with a three-year average of 150 or better. Games against non-Div. I opponents, which don’t count in the RPI, are prohibited as well.

“Winning by itself is not going to get you higher,” Sun Belt commissioner Wright Walter told ESPN in 2010. “You’ve got to schedule … We’ve talked to all the gurus that deal with the RPI and we believe this concept can work.”

This happens all the time during the season:

A team will lose, even get blown out, and have its RPI go up the following morning. Or it will win a tough game on the road before a sellout crowd hungry for an upset, and have its RPI drop.

There’s also the counterintuitive component that 75 percent of your rating relies on nothing you actually do – determined instead by your former opponents and their former opponents with no regard for injury or officiating or travel or the inherent unpredictability of college basketball. You play a team, then pray its star forward doesn’t blow out his knee in the next game.

Lipscomb? Appalachian State? Bowling Green? You might not have played them this season, or in any season. You might not know their coach or players, or mascot or location or that they are even Div. I. But they conceivably can impact your RPI.

Yet the RPI is not RIP, spell check notwithstanding.

One reason, certainly, is tradition. The NCAA Tournament and its unique selection process have never been more popular or profitable (the current TV contract with CBS is worth nearly $11 billion). So why change anything?

Another is that the RPI is largely used by the selection committee less as a predictive tool than a reflective or comparative one. Teams are evaluated by Top 25 RPI wins, Top 50 wins, by “bad” losses under 100.

“If you want something more precise, if you want something that you can take to Vegas and bet on games, this is not going to do it,” Jerry Palm of CBSsports.com, one of the RPI’s longtime proponents, said in a recent podcast. “It is a direct reflection of the kind of year you’ve had, the strength of your schedule, and how you did against your schedule.

“Those are the kind of things the committee wants to reward.”

But it goes deeper than that. The NCAA Tournament is selected and seeded by a committee, by humans, and the inherent flaws in the RPI allow them to do their job while adding an element of mystery – are you on or off the bubble? – that gives March Madness its magnetism. It’s the exotic wart on the cheek of a supermodel.

College football relied on BCS rankings to pick teams for its annual championship game, and a similar model could be created for college basketball, no problem. You’d simply count the top 37 highest-rated teams without automatic berths, and hand them at-large bids. No committee. No Indianapolis hotel. No debate. No drama.

You also could eliminate all bad calls by stopping every 20 seconds to look at instant replay. But isn’t that part of the frustration, and fascination, of sports?

“If they use something more sophisticated, people are going to expect you to follow it,” Palm says. “They’re going to expect you to let the numbers rule. In that case, by using something like (RPI), people don’t want these numbers to rule. They want the committee to rule.”